As a new player to Ars Magica, I find it hard that there aren't enough stats for various animals. I have combed the various PDFs i have, and scavenged some stats from the forum, and a few other locations, but I'm considering creating stats for various animals.
So, my question is this:
What animals would you like to see stated up?
snakes, fox, aurochs (they went extinct in the 17th century so are still around in 1220), various deer, different fishes especially giant river catfish. Maybe I will think of more by tomorrow.
Fox appears in Between Sand and Sea
Hmm. Are there stats for dolphins and sharks and giant squid??
More birds of prey. The pdf mundane animals is nice, but almost everything ends up being a falcon...
There's a template for a fish, plus suggestions for how to modify it for various variaties, on page 58 of Mythic Locations. A dolphin and an octopus is included, but not a shark.
Lands of the Nile has stats for a "scorpion fish" (a 20 foot long horror with spines) on pg 97, with suggestions that they can also be used for a large shark. There's also the Heartbeast of Hilda Oddfish on page 14 of Mythic Locations, although that has been modified by the Mystery of the Epitome. I have a feeling there might be another set of shark statistics somewhere else as well, but I can't remember where.
Lands of the Nile and Between Sand and Sea between them have a fair number of animals you'd find in North Africa. Including giant snakes.
There are suggestions for modifying the Falcon template for different Birds of Prey in Lords of Men (pg 59). Lords of Men also have combat stats for different prey animals (but not full blocks of stats), along with stats for different types of hunting hounds, horses, a squirrel, magpie and monkey.
The Cradle and the Crescent has some stats for arabic birds of prey (pg 106).
I like the approach taken by the Ars Magica line -- stat one animal (e.g. a falcon) and suggest how to change it into related animals (e.g. an eagle); there are many more animals "indirectly statted" in the books than one might guess at first sight.
One statting exercise I would very much love would be that of horses. We have the stats for a basic horse, but how does that change if you are looking at a European stallion bred for war, vs. a purebred arabian, vs. an old nag?
Look at LoM p.55-56. They provided a whole bunch of variants.
I think the bigger problem is that all the information is scattered across quite a few different books. I think, if it were all collected together, the fully statted ones, the variants, and the ones with just a few notes, it would look like a pretty good collection of animals.
Thanks! Some of them i didn't even know about, and it was great to find out!
My plan is to gather all the various animal stats, expand the written variants into their own entries, so it's more visually visible, and to post this, or a link to it, on these forums.
And to stat animals still missing.
Noting this would be something good to collect, here is a beginning of a list. I've gone through over 30 books so far. Hopefully I didn't miss anything in those books, but if you spot something please let me know if I did. I marked three non-real-but-"mundane" ones with asterisks; at least two are worth including because they get adjusted to make real ones. Hmm... It could be worth examining some Animals of Virtue, as they might give help toward stats for mundane animals, such as the Eider Duck of Virtue on p.60 of Mythic Locations.
AtD
AM
Ant
A&A
BS&S
C&G
Cov
DI
F&F
GotF
HM
HP
Hooks
HoH:S
HoH:TL
LoH
LoM
LotN
MoH
ML
RM
TC
ToME
ToP
TC
TCI
TC&TC
TL&TL
TMRE
TSE
TTT
That is incredibly useful. Thank you for sharing.
Wow, thank you so much, it's a huge help!
This is to follow on what I've yet to do from callen's list
I'll try to add some more later. I left out HoH:MC and core / RoP:M / Book of Mundane Beasts since those are the obvious two sets.
There are a few errors, like the boar and the wolf.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B6SQKD6ZADvUhl7aDdAFPrp6xFshtI0n/view?usp=sharing
I have gathered all the animals from the official books, and did my best to try and stat the variants. I do believe there may be a few mistakes, since only when i was halfway through, I realized that size, and the changes in Quickness and Strength affect the combat stats.
Will give this another pass, before I start adding in more animals, and turning the minimal stats we have for some animals, into full stat block.
I've been updating my post above. Something that might also be useful is that there are several Bjornaer Outer Heartbeasts listed. Those don't get refined. Sometimes there may be Characteristic replacement, so that would need to be considered. V/F can be checked against the character's base V/F. I doubt writers increased animal-form Abilities for Inner Heartbeasts.
I did spot at least the spider swarm I added above isn't in there. I think of got most of a stag from an Inner Heartbeast by referring to Hooks p.37-38.
Also, I'd like to suggest not qualifying all sorts of non-falcons as falcons. Falcons are a very small group of raptors. Hawks, eagles, kites, buzzards, harriers, vultures, ospreys, and owls do not fit into that group. If vulture and owl are separate from falcon, doing so with others would be wise; even more so considering pony is listed separately from horse and dog is listed separately from wolf.
Magi of Hermes has a few : asp, bat, camel, crocodile, lion, starting at page 10.